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Two men sentenced to prison in failed "Sextortion" plot against Joe Sebok

A "sextortion" plot where two Silicon Valley men tried to extort professional poker players by threatening to publicize naked photographs and other private information stolen from email accounts was reported by the latimes.com on April 22nd, 2013.

Tyler Schrier, 23, pled guilty to conspiracy, extortion, and unauthorized access to a protected computer to gain privileged information and was sentenced to 42 months in prison. Schrier also admitted as part of his plea that in another plot, he extorted $26,000 from professional poker players. After being charged in the case — while he was out on bond — according to court records, he then illegally accessed two email accounts and stole about $4,000 from online poker accounts.

Keith James Hudson, 39, pled guilty to hacking into a poker player's email account where he stole naked photographs and worked with Schrier to extort poker players. Hudson received a two-year prison term.

The accused illegally hacked into an email account that belonged to Joe Sebok back in the fall of 2010. Schrier threatened to post intimate emails and photographs on the Internet unless Sebok and other victims paid them off — prosecutors noted that the extortion price was hundreds of thousands of dollars.

November 2010 found approximately 100 individuals receiving a nude photograph of Sebok sent by Schrier because Sebok and the other victims in the case did not make any payment. Sebok addressed the court before U.S. district Court Judge James Otero sentenced Hudson and Schrier and said victims in the plot had “their lives altered and shattered in irreparable ways.”

Sebok said the fallout “instantly damaged my ability to sustain my livelihood doing what I had been since 2005,” after the defendants hacked his email account and publicized his information,

Sebok told Otero, “In short, I was no longer able to maintain my then-current level of participation in the poker industry, representing the brands that I had been previously, as well as greatly destroying my ability to do so with new companies moving forward. Without belaboring the point too much, it was a nightmare, and one that I was forced to live through with millions of people watching.”

Ryder Finney, 22, pled guilty to conspiracy and will be sentenced later this year in federal court in Philadelphia. Finney is the third defendant in this case and faces a statutory maximum sentence of five years in prison.